Why Some Devs Can't Wait For NoSQL To Die

theodp writes "Ted Dziuba can't wait for NoSQL to die. Developing your app for Google-sized scale, says Dziuba, is a waste of your time. Not to mention there is no way you will get it right. The sooner your company admits this, the sooner you can get down to some real work. If real businesses like Walmart can track all of their data in SQL databases that scale just fine, Dziuba argues, surely your company can, too."

Comments

Article summary

[BadAnalogyGuy]

People who don't like SQL should get their heads out of their asses and use MySQL, a robust and enterprise-ready database.

Interesting thesis...

Re:Article summary

[digitalunity]

My experience has made me believe PostgreSQL is better in every respect. It's more stable, has more features and is easier to use. The article wasn't specifically pro-MySQL.

The article is largely correct. The movement to ditch SQL databases is really naive. SQL scales just fine, if you know how to use it right. Look at Oracle solutions. All their fancy eBusiness software is still Oracle SQL DB backed and some of the biggest companies in the world are using it.

SQL isn't the problem, it's a tool. Bad programmers are the problem.

Re:Article summary

[RedMage]

We're using both - about five days from our "go-live", and things look good. We just use what makes sense for each part of our application.
For us, this means PostreSQL for the parts that must be transactional ACID, and Amazon's S3 and SimpleDB for parts that don't. In practice, for the 1.0 release, this means things like notes, user accounting, and documents are in S3 and SDB. The rest is plain ole SQL.

Not that there wasn't a learning curve with our developers - we're a bunch of old-time enterprise type developers, so "letting go" and moving out of the traditional SQL world took a little thought and proving time. We'll use the first few months to learn more about doing architecture this way.

We've had the language wars - lets avoid the SQL/NOSQL wars please. I'm tired.

Re:Article summary

[slim]

Look at Oracle solutions. All their fancy eBusiness software is still Oracle SQL DB backed and some of the biggest companies in the world are using it.

Yep, "nobody ever got fired for choosing Oracle".

But to get performance and fault tolerance for Oracle, you need to throw a lot of money at it -- high end hardware, RAC licenses etc. Whereas some of the NoSQL DBs promise lots of scalability on clusters of cheap hardware -- situations where failing hardware is the norm.

If your application suits it (i.e. your data fits the name/value system, and eventual consistency is adequate) why not use something fast and cheap?

Re:Article summary

[deniable]

Some of us are simply looking to not use the relational model for *every* bit of data in the system. Application global, put it in a table. Uploaded files, put them in a table. User data, get it from LDAP, nah, create our own table and get somebody to feed it manually. Given the number of apps I've seen that use SQL as a simple key/value store, it's no wonder that there are techniques to avoid the overhead completely.

Re:Article summary

[c-reus]

Oracle database license prices scale very well, too.

Re:Article summary

[squiggleslash]

There's a fairly obvious reason for NoSQL vs Pro-SQL, and it's this: SQL is absolutely the worst database query language ever invented... apart from all the others.

Virtually no-one who's spent any time analyzing and working with large amounts of data has a good word to say about SQL. It was designed from the start as a language that would be integrated into others, and yet simple real world realities make that impossible, with 99% of implementations being of the "Build a large string, and pass that string to "the SQL connector" to be parsed and interpreted" form. Its handling of null and the empty string is incomprehensible and useless, in part because nobody involved ever had the cajones to do what needed to be done with both. There is no standardized set of data types in the real world. Simple issues with unstandardized case dependencies can make an application that works with Oracle and only uses standard "select" statements not work under, say, PostgreSQL. And these are the surface level technical issues: talk to any relational database guru and they'll come up with numerous philosophical issues too.

To this you add another component that's always an issue: the entirely haphazard way in which relational databases are implemented on most operating systems, whereby the DBMS is another application, that manages its own files, and needs to be coached with kind words and a happy smile in order to get anything done. Does your app use a database for something back-endy, like, for example, MythTV does for its settings and lists of channels and TV programs? Well, either forget it, or be prepared to put your users through hell as they have to ensure that the entirely separate DBMS is installed and that usernames and passwords are set up for your application's use.

And so, naturally, people hate them. With a passion. To the point that anyone sane is going to put it low on the list for any application, even when it's entirely appropriate. Of course your multiuser databases in your enterprise environment should be stored using an enterprise grade RDBMS, and as nobody's come up with anything better, you should be talking to it using SQL.

...and you should be talking to it carefully. Ideally, those writing the application core should be handing over the database access to someone who can abstract each query properly. Because SQL sucks. It just sucks less than anything else designed to do the same thing.

Re:Article summary

[seanadams.com]

Does your app use a database for something back-endy, like, for example, MythTV does for its settings and lists of channels and TV programs? Well, either forget it, or be prepared to put your users through hell as they have to ensure that the entirely separate DBMS is installed and that usernames and passwords are set up for your application's use.

sqlite is underrated and would be ideal for many such applications.

Re:Article summary

[ducomputergeek]

I don't have mod points, but I've found the same thing. It's the perfect development database if you think that your program is ever going to need to support Enterprise class stuff. On the small scale, I've found that it's fast enough. Is MySQL faster? Yes, but where I've tested it's not been enough to really matter compared to the other advantages of PostgreSQL. Primarily that it's ACID compliant. What we've found is that it works well until you start getting into databases that are GB in size. But then you can easily port the datatables to DB2 or Oracle and go. Especially if you designed the rest of the software to do this from the get go.

In production, we moved all but one of our databases from MySQL to PostgreSQL. We were having problems with Innodb corrupted once every couple months. When it was announced that Oracle was bidding on Sun, we ported over to PostgreSQL, spent a couple weeks rewriting code, and we've not touched the Postgres database since. It's not corrupted and not even hiccuped once since we deployed. We run regular vacuuming and maintenance and that's it. It's been humming for well over a year and now is getting 400x's the use than we ever had with MySQL.

The only thing that PostgreSQL was lacking has been HA support. There are number of 3rd party tools that run well, PGCluster, Slony, GridSQL, but this looks like PostgreSQL is going to support native replication, clustering, and HA with hot-standby...

Re:Article summary

[Vancorps]

What product has Oracle ever dropped support for? What is your objection to MSSQL? SQL 2005/2008 are damn fine products which perform extremely well. Sounds to me like you're the one that is ignorant with blanket policies against industry standard tools.

Of course I run Oracle, MySQL, and MS SQL in my datacenter all without problems and some under nice and heavy loads. About the only sensible stance you have is with Postgresql which is far and away better than MySQL which in my opinion sucks pretty bad.

Re:Article summary

[TheLink]

The syntax might be crap, but it's far easier to get everyone to standardize on SQL to talk to DBs.

"NoSQL" stuff is fine if your company is simple in structure - very few products/services, and it has to write most of that stuff itself anyway.

When you have many different departments with their own different apps (in house and 3rd party), and they all want to access the same bunch of databases, SQL just becomes the "standard API or language" you use to talk to them. In contrast say you have some custom "NoSQL" DB, it's going to be harder to find stuff that talks to it (you might have to write your own connectors).

It's just like "English", the syntax might be crap, but it's far easier to get 3rd parties and other departments to use it. In contrast if you use Lojban, despite its supposed advantages you're probably going to have to get translators (or worse - train your own translators) whenever you need to deal with outsiders who don't speak it.

Re:Article summary

[mcrbids]

Virtually no-one who's spent any time analyzing and working with large amounts of data has a good word to say about SQL.

I've spent 10 years developing intensively relational applications with SQL. I love it!

It was designed from the start as a language that would be integrated into others, and yet simple real world realities make that impossible, with 99% of implementations being of the "Build a large string, and pass that string to "the SQL connector" to be parsed and interpreted" form.

So... because people don't bother to to learn about things like prepared statements, the tool is bad? It's like saying that cars suck because they don't have cruise control!

Its handling of null and the empty string is incomprehensible and useless, in part because nobody involved ever had the cajones to do what needed to be done with both.

OK, so enlighten us with your brilliance! Share with us the ultimate answer of what should be done to differentiate a null (logically, "I don't know") with a blank string (logically, "We know there's nothing there") and what should be done differently?

IMHO, the concept of "null" is a very useful one which allows a developer to differentiate between a blank answer and a no answer.

There is no standardized set of data types in the real world. Simple issues with unstandardized case dependencies can make an application that works with Oracle and only uses standard "select" statements not work under, say, PostgreSQL.

Woah, hold on there boy! You mean to say that features specific to one database engine won't work with another? Well spank my uncle and grease my kittens - this is amazing! Unless, of course, you stick to ANSI 92 syntax, which is pretty much 100% compatible. Yes, there's some regression testing you'll have to do against the different databases. Just like you have to do with HTML, XML, or any other standards-based language.

(yawn)

And these are the surface level technical issues: talk to any relational database guru and they'll come up with numerous philosophical issues too.

Strange how you didn't manage to name even one?

But here's the part of this whole "NoSQL vs SQL" debate - SQL is an interface API to a DBMS, it's not the database itself! You can use any number of technologies "under the hood" including those
types of technologies commonly referred to as "NoSQL" and put an SQL interface in front! The whole idea that SQL is somehow the problem is just.... idiotic and betrays an astonishing lack of understanding by the programmer(s) involved.

It's like saying that you should have a stick-shift car because automatic transmissions don't go as fast. It's just moronic. Arguing about NoSQL is like arguing with a tea party dolt about the "socialist" health car plan that just passed! (that was first drafted by the "right wingers" 15 years ago)

It's argument from stupidity.

Re:Article summary

[Onymous Coward]

Two orders of magnitude is not 20x, it's 100x.

And for non-intensive applications, that's still fine.

And SQLite isn't actually that slow anyway. It's comparable.

Re:Article summary

[Kenneth Stephen]

Au contraire.

While there are problems with SQL, 95% of its users are happy as a clam that it exists. The unhappy users are the ones who are pushing the boundaries of what SQL allows and those are the people who know SQL best. When you are writing SQL queries that span 200 lines of code, then, and only then do you begin to scratch at the limits of what SQL allows. Until then, you've only hit the limits of competence.

I've been working with SQL for over 20 years now. I've worked with applications that didn't use RDBMS's. Some of them used flat files. Some of them used hierarchial databases. People who haven't had the same sort of experiences, haven't come to the realization of why SQL was invented - and that results in then making ill-founded statements like "SQL is absolutely the worst database query language ever invented". Utter tosh. SQL has its problems, but its one of the best. That's why it has left its competitors in the dust of time.

I look around at all the frameworks that have evolved to not do SQL (EJB-QL, Hibernate, etc) and I laugh. None of those languages come close to handling the same breath and width of problems that SQL can be used to solve. Whenever I see advocates of these frameworks all puff up with fervour, I feel like shaking them and say "Your emperor has no clothes!". The list of problems these frameworks can't solve is so huge that one wonders why anyone works with them at all. But I suppose, there are plenty of people who work for small businesses who haven't encountered the kind of problems that big enterprises have.

The parent poster that I'm responding to has apparently had an problems porting SQL code. But guess what? Even on the unix platform, applications written in C have had trouble being ported from one Unix to the next. People have worked around it. Nobody goes around arguing that "C is absolutely the worst programming language ever invented".

Re:Article summary

[jc42]

... the syntax of PROLOG, for example, seems much simpler, more powerful, and makes more sense to me.

Yeah, wouldn't it be wonderful if instead of all the complex cruft usually needed to find the data you need in that morass, you could just write a prolog expression and let the interpreter resolve it? But when I mention this to Team Leaders, they inevitably look at me like I'm from Mars. They have no idea what prolog is or does. (And I'm actually from a planet much farther away than Mars. ;-)

But when all is said and done, you can get familiar with most of SQL in a couple weeks.

True, perhaps, and I did that years ago. But that doesn't deal with the major problem with SQL: In my experience, every relational database I've ever worked with was in the grips of a set of professional RDB priests, and you didn't do anything in SQL without their blessing. If they didn't approve of what you were trying to do (typically because they couldn't be bothered to listen to you), it wouldn't get done during your lifetime.

So I've learned to cultivate them as an acolyte. I write my "prototype" to use flat files, typically small files full of name:value pairs, sometimes with the name part the file name and the value the contents, and a directory tree of multiply-linked files to classify stuff. I agree with their criticism of this, and say that I'd be happy to convert the code to use their DB when they have the time to help me get those subroutines working right. While they chew on that, I get the project working with the flat files, and get some users using it. When the priest finally face the fact that the project works without their help, they finally deign to help.

But I've never seen them actually get the SQL working to the point that it can supplant the flat files. The parts that do work are always so slow that turning on the "useDB" switch makes it too sluggish to actually use. In some cases, I can get around this by writing "pre-pass" code to extract the common data sets from the DB and write it to flat files, which the interactive software can read through quickly.

It has long seemed to me that SQL and RDBs in general are Good Ideas. But unless we can find a way to end the stranglehold of the DB priesthood in an organization, it's all sorta hopeless for a mere "developer" to even consider jumping into the mess. It's better to just develop stuff that works, and let the DB experts handle the task of porting it to the DB. That way, we developers can keep our hands clean of all the theology, and actually develop stuff that works.

Of course, this is all heresy to the True Believers ...

Re:Article summary

[BitZtream]

Considering that by the time you 'need' Oracle, the price of Oracle is a drop in the bucket.

The only people that ever complain about the price of Oracle are the people who will never have the need to use it because they'll never have the traffic to it to require it.

Sorry you haven't got to play with the big boys, but in general if you spend your time worrying about how much 'software costs' your business sucks. Software costs, even for Oracle, are trivial compared to the other costs that go into it.

An Oracle DB serving internet facing customers for instance is going to cost an order of magnitude more for bandwidth in the first year than the cost of an Oracle license to deal with it.

But you go ahead, keep pretending you have some sort of clue and are witty by pointing out its expensive. If you ever make it to that scale, the last thing on your mind will be the price of an Oracle license.

Re:Article summary

[ppanon]

It's not heresy. However, I have seen a lot of crap data models produced by developers (even worse than what I come up with as GUI designs). I have also seen developers produce SQL that looked OK at first glance but performed abysmally under certain conditions (and have even saved the odd project by finding those and fixing them when the system started dying under load). If you access a SQL database like you would a set of flat files, it is never going to give you the performance that a flat file access will give you for raw throughput because you've got all the extra communications latency. However if you re-write your search and extract queries to pull your data in a single SQL statement instead of a statement for each of your N tables involved in the result, then SQL is going to kick ass as soon as you start getting enough data and users placing enough queries that all the indexes and caching can pay off.

Flat files will work better for certain types of unstructured data, but most people who get crap performance out of SQL databases just don't understand how to use SQL databases properly. Which is why those True Believers tend to get upset about crap SQL implementations: because those tend to bog down a SQL server and slow down all the well-written apps too.

No, the real problem with most SQL DBAs is that they haven't adapted to agile methodologies. They still want the data model to be spring fully armored from Zeus' head according to classic waterfall planning. What they need to do is to get some data modelling tools that support round trip engineering so that they can make changes as the developer needs them and have upgrade scripts checked into source control along with the code on new builds. Right now there's only a few tools like ErWin and Data Architect that support that kind of development, and they tend to be ridiculously expensive. The one exception is DeZign for Databases Professional which is comparatively cheap. A lot of companies will lay out a lot of cash for developer tools but won't fork over the dough necessary for their data modelers/DBAs to properly support developer activity. So yeah, the DBAs tend to be a little reticent to do all that work by hand. While there are some developers who still use notepad or gedit by choice, nobody seems to expect them to do it, or to have the same productivity as someone with a decent tool chain.

The Actual Quote is

[Daengbo]

"MySQL or PostgreSQL," for what it's worth. PostgreSQL is a pretty powerful database, and you should have to make a pretty good argument why leaving a well understood technology that powers a lot (an some of the largest parts) of the WWWeb needs to be trashed for something newer and less tested.

I can't wait for databases to die

[Anonymous Coward]

XML text files all the way! /duck

Re:I can't wait for databases to die

[WrongSizeGlass]

Let me be the first to say whoosh .

Re:I can't wait for databases to die

[Phroggy]

Remember, XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, use more!

Hardware is cheap. Developers aren't.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's really that simple. A standard dual socket server with the latest CPU's from Intel or AMD can handle hundreds of requests per second; if one isn't enough, just add more hardware, one month of salary can buy you another node, a year can buy you a whole cluster of rackable systems or a chassis full of blades. If it takes a few months extra for a team to solve the problem the NoSQL way, that's a few months of extra salary costs and missed sales.

Slashdot runs on SQL. I run a site of 1M pages daily (1/3-slashdot according to Alexa) with just a single system with 2x Xeon E5420, Django/PostgreSQL at 10% load. Unless you attract enough attention to require scaling past 10M pages a day, you're wasting your time reinventing the wheel with NoSQL, just stick with a standard ORM, launch your site and start convincing customers and generate sales. You can survive a slashdotting just fine without spending so much time on those exotic tools.

Re:Hardware is cheap. Developers aren't.

[pavera]

Pretty sure he meant 1M page views/day as he compares it to slashdot using alexa data.... Is reading comprehension really that hard? Context clues are your friend.

I run a site using django/postgres, we do about 100k page views/day on a 512Mb 10GB Virtual machine. Its not doing anything crazy like google, but yeah, we aren't close to needing more power yet. When we do, first thing we'll do is bump up RAM for increased cache space...

Re:Hardware is cheap. Developers aren't.

[Lazy Jones]

Unless you attract enough attention to require scaling past 10M pages a day, you're wasting your time reinventing the wheel with NoSQL, just stick with a standard ORM, launch your site and start convincing customers and generate sales.

Most of the buzz about these things comes from and is aimed at people who actually believe they'll build the next Facebook or Twitter. The fallacy is in their belief that it's the size/traffic of those sites that supposedly mandates NoSQL and not the simple data models. Some of the biggest, less spectacular projects out there run on PostgreSQL for example (Skype, Affilias = .info and .org).

Don't you dare tell me...

[AmazingRuss]

... that I can't tell others what to do!

Some docs can't wait for Cardiac Clamps to die.

[Vellmont]

So you're in surgery for 3 hours doing a kidney transplant, having used your trusty medium vascular clamp that have served you for the past 20 years. You're finally done and the patient is in recovery, so you sit down to relax with the latest copy of JAMA. They've got a great article about the latest development of Cardiac clamps, and you think to yourself "Why not use a heart clamp for kidney transplants!" Brilliant. So you order up some new clamps from MedicalClamps.com, and use them on your next patient. The surgery goes fine, but 3 months later the patient is back in your office with a failed kidney. You open 'em up, and it's obvious the clamp exerted too much pressure on the artery, damaging it in the process. Stupid carciac clamps! You're not a heart surgeon!

Re:Some docs can't wait for Cardiac Clamps to die.

[gazbo]

You missed out the bit where the article about cardiac clamps talks about how much better they are than the old-fashioned medium vascular clamp. And how every subsequent edition of JAMA has several articles all trumpeting the glory of the cardiac clamps over the now-outdated vascular clamps (although all of these articles are written by first-year med students who have never actually performed an operation - but they did once have a nose-bleed and chose to use a cardiac clamp to stop it).

Analogies are FUN!

...because "there can be only one!"

[Joce640k]

The whole of geek debating is based on the Highlander principle.

Price may favor noSQL for some applications

[cervo]

Many of the NoSQL sources scale better than a normal database and are available cheap. Oracle costs a fortune, and if you want to run Oracle on a cluster good luck. They also don't let you publish benchmarks without their permission. But most people I know who use Oracle claim it totally beats everything else (without further clarification). DB2 includes a cluster edition that is also quite good. It uses a shared nothing architecture. But none of these solutions are free. Also teradata is also cited as a good parallel database. If you are a start-up and your choice is a NoSQL solution that is almost free or 100,000+ for some commercial parallel database, which do you go to?

But no matter what you will consume resources with a relationship database on ensuring consistency (which many times is what you want but not 100% of the time). Amazon's Dynamo works by not caring so much about consistency and trading consistency for availability of the overall service. For a shopping cart it is fine, but you wouldn't want to do your credit card processing using it. Google's GFS is optimized to do the file operations that google does the most. However there was an article in the ACM not that long ago comparing Map Reduce (Hadoop's implementation) against two parallel databases, and it lost. OF course the Parallel Databases were all not free....and hadoop is....

So overall I'd say the decision comes down to price mostly (as it does with most startups). If you can make do with one server than sure do PostgreSQL (or mySQL...although they always tried to force licensing for commercial products even though it is GPL...). If you need a cluster, both have clustering solutions, but as far as I can tell they are not as good as the commercial Parallel databases. If you have lots of money then sure go with Oracle, it seems through word of mouth Oracle is the best for both parallel and stand alone in terms of performance. DB2 was good enough for a former job. They had terabytes in the mid 1990's using about 20 servers. Now that the hardware is much better I'm sure it scales even better.... But if money is a consideration, then go with an open source noSQL solution. A lot of people now swear by Cassandra, I haven't had a chance to check it out yet.

I'm Still Fuzzy on NoSQL

[RAMMS EIN]

I'm still fuzzy on what NoSQL is supposed to be and what it is supposed to bring to the table.

From what I've understood, it's basically a common banner for various different databases that all share the common property of not being relational databases and not providing ACID guarantees.

If so, it seems to me that the whole NoSQL vs. RDMBS debate is about a false dichotomy. There are some applications where a relational database is the right tool for the job, and there are some where a relational database is not the right tool for the job. In some of those latter cases, one of the NoSQL databases may be the right thing.

This is nothing new. Non-relational databases have been used on Unix for a long time, and are even a standard part of POSIX (see for example the manpage for dbm_open). It's also long been known that, for example, Berkeley DB can be a lot faster than an RDBMS - as long as your application doesn't make use of all the features an RDBMS provides. Lots of programs even don't use one of these database systems, but invent their own, custom format. Git is a very successful example of this.

To me, it seems that what we are seeing here is loads of people who had learned to use relational databases for all their storage needs discovering that there are other ways to store data, and that one of those methods may work better than an RDMBS for a particular application. Well, yes. Does that surprise anyone? It sure doesn't surprise me. Does it mean that RDMBSes are now useless? Not at all. Does it mean you should use a non-relational storage system where this makes more sense? Of course! Now, can we please get back to work? I don't see the point of having a holy war over whether RDBMS or NoSQL is better, when common sense says that they both have their uses.

Re:Can't wait it to die?

[RightSaidFred99]

No, he's saying he can't wait for the _hype_ over NoSQL to die.